Wayne Dawkins/Commentary
3/31/2007
The new Daylight Savings time, which went into effect several weeks before traditional early April clock forwarding, does injustice to the term Standard Time.
What’s standard about four months of normal time during a 12-month year?
And as a member of my church observed, energy
conservation will not go down, consumption will go up. Why? We will have more
daylight to drive our cars and run our adult toys.
Where’s convenience for fourth graders who will be wandering in the dark at 8 a.m. next fall? And if the kids are in Northern Michigan, make that fumbling in the dark until 8:30.
Farmers will probably have their biological and ecological rhythms interrupted yet again. Also, will flora and fauna have their mating rituals disturbed?
I see selfishness and greed in this new Daylight Savings scheme.
And I speak as a sun lover who suffers during winter’s darkness.
Let’s save energy by conserving our resources.
Tell your members of Congress to repeal this bad new law.
* * *
The more detail that came to light, the more I shook my head in disbelief after turning away from each morning’s paper.
Eight U.S. Attorneys General were fired by the Justice Department.
The reasons given by the Bush administration were poor job performance.
But when performance evaluations contradicted such claims and instead revealed highly regarded public servants, the new story was the attorneys general serve at the pleasure of the president, which is true.
Yet while it’s not uncommon for a president to clean house at the start of a new administration and hire people from his political party, why was Bush & Co. firing Justice Department officials during the midterm election of a second term?
That appeared unprecedented, and rotten.
Speaking of rotten, any of you catch former U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay’s interview on NPR late last month? The Texas Republican, who resigned after he was indicted for money laundering, was unrepentant.
OK, DeLay is allowed his day in court to try and convince us he’s innocent. Yet I was stunned by his bizarre ambition to build “a permanent Republican Party” and use K Street lobbyists as infrastructure.
DeLay called his Democratic adversaries “enemies,” and when the interviewer asked, "aren’t there times when the partisans must work together?," DeLay said no.
He doesn’t understand that we have battles over partisan ideas, but in the end we’re supposed to be Americans working for American interests.
Permanent political establishments are creepy.
Didn’t DeLay learn that absolute power eventually corrupts absolutely?
* * *
Finally, I was impressed by the opening last month of the USS Monitor Center at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Va., my adopted city of nine years.
The Civil War ironclad and its ironclad adversary the CSS Virginia, AKA the Merrimac, battled to a draw in 1862 and revolutionized naval warfare and instantly ended the wooden warship era.
I was introduced to two African-American players featured in the Monitor story.
There was the obedient slave woman who told her master she “wanted to take a walk.”
Mary Louvestre walked nearly 200 miles, from Southern Virginia to Washington, D.C., and told the Secretary of the Navy about the Confederates’ plans to build a devastating warship.
“The woman passed through the lines at great risk to herself,” said the Navy secretary.
Her actions made me recall the heroics of another slave turned spy, James Armistead Lafayette.
Armistead gathered intelligence on the British Army while posing as a harmless slave, then rowed away in a boat to drop a dime on Gen. Cornwallis and set up the Revolutionary War-ending rout by George Washington and French military forces at Yorktown.
The other Monitor player was a uniformed black
man who stared blankly while sitting on the deck of the ship, surrounded by
white crewmates. I first saw that photo in the corridor of my former newspaper,
the Daily Press of Hampton Roads. The photo was among a handful celebrating the
region’s maritime and military heritage.
At the Monitor Center, crewmember Siah Carter was brought to life as a re-enactor performed in a video: He was a cook on the ironclad.
Text on display explained that Carter was not alone.
In all, there were seven African-Americans in the USS Monitor crew.
The museum exhibit is rich in detail. I will return soon to absorb more details and show off this cultural jewel to friends who are as intrigued as I.
[Photo credit: nos.noaa.gov]
